So now I am recovering from a busy weekend and getting used to Gracia being away again - holidaying in Malta with her girlies. It seems no sooner is she back than she is off again. I love that she is so confident and loves to travel so much - this is her 7th week abroad just under a year!

Now, after this post I vowed to never do Gracia's washing again but when she brought home this much washing (only washing underwear and bedding since Easter) I have had to give in and get it done.

I still have loads to do but I felt that I would rather get it out of the way than there be a stand off and it not be done.

This is the pile AFTER I have done 5 machine loads!

Reasons to be cheerful.

1. My girlie is off with her girlies and having fun.

2. The washing pile is slowly diminishing.

3. Off for a lovely walk, with Kiera, to the local garage for a pint of milk.

8
comments:

Welcome Back

18:02
Karen
6 Comments

As soon as I saw Dawn's beautiful class yesterday, I knew I had to do it. It is my favourite class of the whole cyber crop. Although I didn't have the class kit I used Cosmo Cricket Tea for Two range, which are more my colours than lots of pink.

I couldn't be bothered to drag out my sewing machine so attached the flowers to the page by sewing buttons on and used a doily instead of punching a circle. I am delighted with the result.

I don't think I could have put any more than I have. I love to journal and my favourite pages are the ones that I look on as a photo diary.

It gives me such pleasure to look back on layouts and think 'I had forgotten all about that'. So I really felt the need to document the year between Gracia's 18th and 19th Birthday. I used Prima Almanic for this page

The sketch was designed
by the lovely and very, very talented Jane. I used this as the basis
for my Bologna Babes layout (the title came from the name Gracia gave to
the group who went to Italy together at Easter).

Because it was a
layout about their travels I changed the circle for a 'giant' luggage
label and then made three more labels in varying sizes for photos and
journailing.

0
comments:

Counting the days.

08:39
Karen
14 Comments

This time next week we will either be with Gracia packing up her things ready to come home for the summer or very nearly there. I am so excited and just can't wait. We haven't seen her since Easter and it's the longest she has been away without a visit home. I am going to state my intention now on my blog so that if I break it you will all know - I am going to try my hardest to not have any arguments, shouting matches or cross words with her for the whole of the summer. There I have said it so I will have to keep to it now it is out there in cyberland. I really hope I can but I have to remember it is a two way thing and sometimes Gracia will just niggle me on purpose. I must stick to the mantra 'Just Walk Away'!

A photo for illustrative purposes only from 4 years ago!

All that aside, I was thinking last night how much she has done in the last year and how many photos I have of all her achievements. I love to put lots of journaling on my pages but when I have acquired my photos from facebook I don't know the story behind the photos and in a way that makes me sad. It is all part of her growing up, leaving home for Uni and making a wonderful life for herself.

When I got home yesterday, at 6pm (that time is important for later on in this story) on the sofa (I didn't get home in time to grab it and cunningly hide it with the rest of my stuff) was a pizza box with an order from ATDML.

I purchased a little bit of extra stash from their Sale - still on as I type this, and as David was going on a boy's night out, decided that I would eat my supper as soon as I could, throw on my pjs and do a little paper shuffling. So by 9pm I had cooked and eaten supper and used some of the contents of my pizza box. I must add that also in the box was my DT kit for July so I could just honestly say, when I opened my box in front of David -'Oh good it's my DT kit!' When I read this it makes David sound as though he restricts my purchasing - not at all but I am embarrassed by how often pizza boxes arrive at our home.

The photo I chose was one from Gracia's European tour and I didn't know where it was taken, just a photo I liked. It got me thinking that there is so much of her life that I don't know about. Hence the self indulgent journaling.

Have a lovely weekend.

Reasons to be cheerful:

1. My girl is coming home.

2. My girl is coming home.

3. Did I mention, my girl is coming home?

14
comments:

Hexing it up!

07:42
Karen
10 Comments

Yesterday was the EK crop and to celebrate the Jubilee I made these

Blueberry and lemon cupcakes with lemon and cream cheese frosting.

While at the crop I made a layout using hexagons. I drew a template using a compass and was surprised when asked to show how I had done it. I truly believed that every knew how to do it. So in case you don't and as hexagons are so on trend at the moment here is a quick tutorial.

1. Draw a circle. Keeping the compass at the same settings
put the point of the compass anywhere on the circle and draw two lines that intersect the circle.

2. Put the point of the compass on one of these intersections and draw two more lines.

3. You will now have four lines and a big gap. Put the compass on one of the lines next to the gap and draw an intersection line on the circle. Do the same with the other line next to the gap.

4. You should now have six lines even spaced around your circle.

5. Draw a straight line between the intersection lines and you have your hexagon. The size of your hexagon (measured between two opposite points) will be the same as your circle e.g if you draw a three inch circle you will get a hexagon that is three inches between two opposite points,.

(Rinda's fault as she posted about a class she was taking which prompted me to take this one which I had been dithering over for a week or so)!

The prompt was to use primary colours on a layout. So this is the layout I made using hexagons. I couldn't work out why the layout didn't sit well with me. I orginally made the page with the hexagons flat sides at the top and bottom but late last night pulled them all off and put them back with corners facing top and bottom and liked it so much better. Sometimes it's just a tiny detail that makes all the difference.

I also made this one for the class as the second prompt was to use tertiary colours and Amy made a lovely monochrome layout, so I wanted to make one too.

Then this evening, as I was still in a hexagon mood, I made this quick layout.

I can hear you saying "Surely that can't be one of Karen's pages - it's so flat without a bumpy bit in sight". I did try to bumpy it up a bit but couldn't find a way that didn't detract from the hexagons so decided to leave it flat.

Reasons to be cheerful:-

1. That Gracia is happy to do silly things just to make us laugh.

2. Watching the making of the Jubilee song - such beautiful people from all over the world .

10
comments:

The Frisbee Flop

Gracia and I are so alike in many ways. I have passed on many of my traits that I am proud of but unfortunately I have also passed on things that are not so good. The main being dyslexia.

When I was a child this was not recognised as a condition and I was just deemed to be bad at spelling and naughty for not learning my spellings for the Friday spelling test. I can vividly remember the number of Fridays I feigned illness to try and avoid the humiliation of always coming bottom when I couldn't understand why the words would not stay in my head.

It is really funny because if you look at my school reports and at Gracia's you could swap the names over and they would read the same. I struggled at school with my inability to spell and, even now if I am under stress and I have to write a word I am unfamiliar with I sometimes don't even know what letter it starts with! But I still managed to get A level English and a 1st in my degree. When I took my P.A. course my shorthand was also all written back to front, in fact I was told by my shorthand teacher to never apply for a job that required shorthand. Now
Gracia and I laugh about our inability to spell.

Another downside of being dyslexic is that we have quite poor coordination - we both frequently trip over our own feet, bump into things as our spacial awareness is poor, I still cannot tell my left from my right and when driving people know to say 'turn my way' or 'turn your way' because if they say right or left, by the time I have decided what they mean I have either passed the turning or turned in the opposite direction to the one they want. Neither of us has any sense of direction. We often walk away from a meal wearing half of it. Up until a short while ago Gracia still took a spare t-shirt when she went out and recently,when we went for a cooked breakfast before out little jaunt to London, she put her cardigan on back to front over her top so that if she dropped her bake beans it would go on her cardi and not on her top!

Dyslexia has meant that we really do not have any hand to eye coordination, we cannot play games with fast moving or small objects such as tennis or badminton. Our brains do not compute fast enough to react in time to return a volley or even catch a ball thrown to us.

So with this in mind, four years ago, when I took Gracia and her best friend Hannah to the beach for the afternoon and they were playing with a Frisbee I asked her how far she thought she could throw the it. She answered with all honesty "About this Far" holding her hands about a foot apart. This was the photo and this is the resulting layout -

The Frisbee Flop.

Of course she could have thrown it further but it would have been in completely the wrong direction because letting go of it at the right time requires the kind of coordination that we certainly do not possess!

Reasons to be cheerful:

1. That we can accept our short falls, overcome them and make the most of what we have.

2. That we are both able to laugh at and accept our inability to eat a meal without spilling it down ourselves.

3. That Eileen reminded me of this story and I was able to put it into words for Storytelling Sunday.

19
comments:

Does it have to be new?

14:07
Karen
4 Comments

When we went to the ATDML retreat the DT were allowed to choose exactly what they wanted to design with and I surprised Jill by choosing some papers from Bella Blvd. These papers were just so me and so fresh and lively looking that in truth I hadn't realised that they were old ranges! Just goes to show how much notice I take of current trends :0)

I was so inspired by the papers that I made 5 layouts, 3 cards and a mini book. So I will show you my favourite couple of layouts today and the rest later in the week.

Birthday Girl (how I wished I had been there on her Birthday but facebook photos and skyping were almost as good).

Not Your Average Girl (I think that just about sums me up!)

I experimented with my new Martha Stewart round the page punches on this one.

So my question is - Does a paper range have to be new to excite you?

Reasons to be cheerful:-

1. Having the fore-site to bring my laptop to work so that I could blog at lunchtime.

2. It's a 4 day weekend.

3. This day in two weeks time we will be on our way to pick up our girlie for the summer break - excited is not the word for it!